once upon a time

18Jun09

i found a shortcut to shibuya on my daily walk today, and felt rather embarrassed that instead of taking a direct, straight road there, i had previously always tried to follow the railway tracks laboriously, roving round and round the shinsen area somewhat uncertainly because the tracks disappear underground there. it is a reflection of how i live my life – circumventing the obvious but comforting myself with the thought that i had, perhaps, taken the longer scenic route.

not meaning to actually emerge in shibuya, i wandered around rather aimlessly for a while, feeling a little naked because despite being this close to home, shibuya is town, and town is not a place you stroll down to in your geek-spectacles and a face clean of make-up (or at least, not my kind of face).

and so, i found myself in a karaoke box before long, for the first time in a long while. flipping listlessly through the books, i knew i didn’t want to sing, yet started to key in every single ABBA song on the list out of force of habit. and perhaps it was ABBA magic, or the sleazy colored lights in the room that start to go on and off automatically when you sing, or the flourescent designs on the wall that show up in the darkness (highly innovative, i must say)… i sang. i danced. i had a good time.

and the memories. what a flood of memories.

i remember spending a lot of time in karaoke boxes when i couldn’t afford to sing in a choir. i remember going through the songlist in alphabetical order, and loving that ABBA always comes first. there is nothing like ABBA to put you in a jovial karoke mood. i remember the twelve-hour karaoke marathons with a like-minded friend. i remember learning to sing amusing japanese pop tunes. i remember the one guy who was tone-deaf and knew it, and who always spent every session doing nothing but raps. nobody could rap like him, although we had to fill in the tuneful bits. i remember singing the titanic theme for a crush, yet feeling rather mortified that he actually liked the song. i remember dragging s to a karaoke box and stunning him because he never really believed i could sing.

then there are some other memories. of being the vocalist in a jazz group back in my undergrad days. of being strangely un-self-conscious back in those days, doing gigs at school and in town. of hearing my voice played back at me during a radio show at school (and becoming thoroughly sick of singing fly me to the moon). of my first major solo in life back in junior college, performing the boy in new york city complete with dance steps. oh, and that embarrassing duet in the talent competition, singing a love song in an orange dress… oh the height of seventeen year-old folly!

i miss that kind of easy confidence i used to carry onto the stage with me; the unabashed enjoyment i felt in performing, in having my voice heard; the ability to let a poor performance go and blithely bounce back again. how… how…? is youth really such an elixir?

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Tags: karoke, singing